


The Ties That Bind

by kisahawklin



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Background Lorne/Parrish, Gen, Soul Bond, Team, Team Bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-19
Updated: 2014-12-19
Packaged: 2018-03-04 17:40:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3076475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kisahawklin/pseuds/kisahawklin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is not the kind of team bonding experience John had signed up for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Ties That Bind

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mandykaysfic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mandykaysfic/gifts).



> Oh, man, mandykaysfic, thank you so much for a bunch of awesome prompts. There is so much more to this (a whole Lorne team piece), but this is what I could manage for a December treat. I hope you enjoy.

=++=++=++=

John groans. His mouth tastes like goat piss. His whole body is a pulsing mass of hurt and he doesn't want to open his eyes because there's more than one someone in the bed with him, and that is just never a good thing the morning after.

"Shut up and go back to sleep," Rodney says, and surprisingly, that makes John feel better. He cracks an eye open to see his team flopped all over the bed in a pile, still clothed. 

"Okay," John says, and shuts his eyes.

=++=++=++=

It's not that he hadn't heard the knock at the door, it's that he was avoiding answering it. The knocker had been persistent, though, and after four attempts, the door exploded inward.

"Sir!" Lorne says, and John cracks an eye open enough to see Lorne take in the whole scene and look studiously at one corner of the room.

John sighs. It's a good thing that Ronon's a heavy sleeper when he's drunk, because Lorne would probably be stunned by now if he wasn't. "What, Lorne." He tries to make it a question but he just can't get up enough enthusiasm.

Lorne clears his throat. "I think you might want to see this." 

John sighs again. This is supposed to be their freebie, their Itruveean wine festival or Kanthna skiing competition. Every team has good relations with a planet or two and gets invited to partake in their festivals. The Ylaantene spring harvest picnic-hoedown-ritual was one of three that John's team had wheedled their way into.

There are four teams here, actually, because for every person that gets to play, there is one to watch their back. His team and Lorne's had pulled the long straws and got to join in the dancy-drinky-ceremony-thingee and Teldy's and Gottschalk's had gotten to hang out and watch.

"See what?" John asks, and then takes a good look at Lorne. He's only wearing a t-shirt over his BDUs, and there are marks of some kind on his arm that were definitely not there the last time he and Lorne had geared up together. "Major?" John asks, sitting up quickly and regretting it.

Lorne rolls his sleeve the rest of the way up and John can see three marks, in varying shades of pink. The mark on top looks a bit like a sideways teardrop and is a muted greyish pink. The second one is a bunch of intersecting lines in a nearly neon shade of fuschia. The bottom symbol is three curved lines, concentric circles with one side left open. It's ballerina pink. 

"What the hell are those?" 

Lorne smiles tightly and says, "Maybe you should check your left arm."

"What?" Rodney asks, and John turns his head to look at his team, all awake and calm, their eyes on him. He nods at them. They're all alive and whole, so that's something at least. 

He can see Teyla's bare arm, though, and she has three symbols etched onto it. The top one looks like a jellyfish, in an iridescent sort of shimmering green. The second one is a sideways chevron, in a yellowy-green. The third one is an asymmetric triangle with a line down the center to make it look almost 3D, like a pyramid. It's a deep forest green. 

Teyla looks down at her arm, rubbing her thumb slowly over the raised marks. "They don't hurt," she says.

John pulls off his long sleeve shirt, not terribly surprised to see three marks on his left arm. He has the chevron and the pyramid, but instead of the jellyfish, he has a crescent moon with a small raised circle in the middle. The marks they share are the same color, but the moon is shifting from a kelly green to an orangy-pink. "I think," Teyla says, her eyes going wide, "we may have engaged in a ritual last night."

Rodney scoffs, and before John can do something to stop him from putting his foot into his mouth, he says, "Obviously we were involved in a ritual. But we must have been pretty drunk for us to not remember them branding us."

Teyla shakes her head, and the fear John can see in her eyes scares the crap out of him. That, in turn gets Ronon to sit right the hell up into a defensive posture, which doesn't do much to Rodney except make him ask, "What?" a few hundred times.

"These aren't brands," Teyla says, and puts a trembling hand to her forehead. The marks on her arm have turned various shades of pink and orange, except the chevron, which is a riot of colors, red and blue and grey and orange.

The rest of Lorne's team have crowded around him, in various states of half-dressed, all with three marks on their upper arms.

"Yes?" Rodney asks, annoyance starting to creep into his tone.

Teyla looks at John, worry clear in the pinched look on her face. Ronon groans and flops back onto the bed. "Nol-makt," he says, and Teyla nods. 

John glances at Rodney to see if he has any clue, and when he gets a blank stare back, he checks out Lorne's team. Satisfied it's a Pegasus thing, he turns back to Teyla and Ronon.

"A commitment ceremony," Teyla says. 

That gets Rodney to sit up. "A _what_?" _Oh, shit._

=++=++=++=

"You can't undo a commitment ceremony, John," Teyla says hauling on his elbow and making him stop his determined march to Gerent Palyr's home. "Don't you remember the questions they asked us? About how dedicated we were to each other? About what we would do for each other?"

John remembers. He'd needed the fruity wine to loosen his lips, get him to admit those things out loud. Not that he didn't mean them – just that his experience with saying you loved people, out loud, made it real. Spoken words gave it power, and meant it could hurt them… and you.

"So, what," John asks. "What, exactly, does this entail?"

Teyla takes a deep breath, the kind she tries to get them to take when they're meditating. "We're connected. These symbols are our connection to each other. They pick up moods. Emotions."

John nods. "Okay," he says, itching at the chevron. When he looks at Teyla's, it's shifting from pink to red to fire engine red, and John thinks maybe they should get to Rodney before he explodes. "It's just… a little closer than we are normally, right? We're not married or something?"

Teyla shakes her head. "No, the connection doesn't have to do with the type of relationship – only the depth of it. We should be honored that the Ylaante felt the strength of our team was worthy of such a gift."

John raises and eyebrow at the word 'gift,' but Teyla starts scratching her arm hard enough to bleed and they really need to get to Rodney _right now_.

=++=++=++=

John's pretty thankful, in the end, that Teyla and Ronon are so even-keeled. Their marks stay green most of them time, not really bothering him much, which is good because Rodney's chevron goes through all the colors of the rainbow on a daily basis, and considering the speed his moods change at, John is constantly scratching at his arm.

Carson's best guess is that quick mood changes cause irritation to the surrounding skin. "Blocking the neurotransmitters might work," Carson says, and even though it's only been half a day with his triple mood ring on his arm, John can't really imagine not having the marks, not being tied to his team this way. Carson grumbles about brainwashing and looks longingly at their marks as they leave the infirmary together after their post-mission physicals.

=++=++=++=

Lorne's team seems to take it all right, with the exception of Parrish. John likes Lorne, but they aren't really friendly, not the way Lorne is with Cadman or Mehra or even Zelenka. He debates going to one of them for information about Lorne and his team, but decides against it. Lorne is smart enough to let him know if anything life-threatening happens.

He hopes.

=++=++=++=

It doesn't take that long for the marks to fade into the background. He's more pointedly aware of his team's moods, but it's not all that different, really. He's always been hyper-sensitive to his team, and Rodney most of all, so the only difference is that if he feels the skin on his arm itching, he hunts Rodney down and knocks him off trajectory before he can go into full-blown meltdown mode.

It's always fallen to John to do that, but it used to be that he could only do it once someone had radioed for help (mostly Lorne, on Zelenka's say so). Now sometimes Teyla or Ronon will do it if they're closer, and Rodney's started to close down his workstation when he sees one of them, putting his hands up in surrender and leaving with them to get lunch or walk it off or go to bed.

All in all, John thinks, it may actually have been a gift. He wonders how long it will take from him to stop waiting for the other shoe to drop.

=++=++=++=

John finishes his run with Ronon feeling better than he has for a while. One of the side effects of the marks is that he doesn't have to worry about his team when they're out of sight – he knows exactly how they are doing, all the time. He hasn't slept this well since before he came to the Pegasus galaxy.

It's only been three weeks since the ceremony, but he's beginning to sense some nuances in the colors. He can tell when Ronon's green is sleeping green or fighting green (and really, how is he so calm when he's doing hand-to-hand practice with the marines? Are they that little of a challenge?) or just plain zen green. 

Teyla is yellow more often than not, her smile broad and bright and something John would like to see on her face all the time. She's a beautiful emerald green when she's meditating, though, and John will never admit to trying some of her tricks to get the feeling of calm he gets when her mark is that color.

Rodney's irritation has more than a dozen variations in pink and red. He can tell when Rodney is bluffing, too – when he's really hurting (variations on orange) or when he's in need of attention for one reason or another (turquoise blue – and not so much an itch as much as a hum), but not usually anything serious.

He stretches in his room, another ten minutes or so more than the basic ones he does with Ronon. He's gotten to the age where aches and pains will get him if he doesn't carefully stretch all the tricky muscles out, but he doesn't need Ronon to know that.

Ronon's symbol shifts from green to purple just as John turns on his shower. He's never seen extended purple before, just a flash here and there, gone before he could be sure he'd seen it, and he watches the symbol turn, curious. His arm is tingling, too, a slight pins and needles sensation that makes him shudder. He gets undressed, leaving his clothes in a pile on the floor, and climbs into the shower, glad he did when he realizes exactly what the purple means. 

His body breaks out in gooseflesh when the water hits it, and he can't help running a thumb over Ronon's mark. His skin is really sensitive and he can feel himself getting hard. He knows his mark has got to be turning purple, too, which is both embarrassing and desperately hot. Especially when Teyla's and then Rodney's marks follow suit.

=++=++=++=

When they meet up for breakfast, they're all wearing long sleeves, even Teyla. He recognizes the shirt as one of Rodney's – he'd loaned it to her off-world months ago and apparently she'd never given it back.

John knows if he could see the marks, they'd be varying versions of embarrassment-pink. He doesn't really know what to do; it's not like they can undo this now, and he hadn't really expected that horny was an actual mood – or that he'd be stuck knowing when his teammates were frisky. It doesn't help that he has a vague sense of voyeurism about the whole thing, and wonders if they'll all be stuck turning purple if any one of them does. None of them are seeing anyone right now, but it could get really awkward if they do. 

They make it through breakfast with awkward determination, and the whole thing blows over when someone in Rodney's lab nearly blows him up and he goes from his normal pale pink of low-level irritation to cherry red in roughly ten seconds. Then they're all running to the labs and pulling Rodney away bodily, letting Zelenka take over the yelling as they tell Rodney to breathe.

=++=++=++=

It's Lorne's team that puts the system to the test. Cheng and Parrish were pulled away for what Lorne'd been assured was a scientific meet and greet – but less than half an hour later, Parrish's symbol had turned a dull grey and Cheng's was bright orange.

John reads the rest of the report with his heart in his throat, scared to think of what he might do if someone decided to try something like that with his team. Lorne and Goodwin'd pulled out a well-executed rescue, Lorne hauling Parrish to the jumper in a fireman's carry.

John goes to check on Parrish in the infirmary when he finishes the paperwork. He's surrounded by his team, Lorne looming menacingly at the side of his bed. Lorne's team has taken to wearing long sleeves all the time; he isn't one hundred percent sure, but he thinks it's because Lorne and Parrish are together, which means their symbols are probably purple more often than not. He doesn't really care. It's none of his business and basically he just wants all his people to be safe and happy. But it means that he can't get a read on the team because he can't see what their symbols look like. 

It isn't until just that moment that he realizes it's none of his business. All the teams in Atlantis are connected like this. They may not have the symbols or psychic connection (though he does wonder a bit about Teldy's team), but they're all family, and they'll take care of each other.

=++=++=++=


End file.
